by Stuart David
I don’t.
As the corridors start to empty I realize I’m so far away from Baldy Baine’s class I’m going to have to sprint to make it in time, so I don’t go to Baldy Baine’s class at all. Instead I spend the next double wandering from classroom to classroom, peeking into each one through the little pane of glass in the door, trying to see if Cyrus is in there.
I had no idea that there were so many classrooms in the school before. There must be, like, a thousand or something. But I don’t see Cyrus in any of them. Or Elsie Green. I see Drew Thornton, Gary Crawford, my cousin Harry, and Chris Yates. And quite a few randoms see me, and most of them give me the finger. But there are areas down the left-hand side and along the back wall in each class that I can’t see, so I assume Cyrus and Elsie must be in one of those spots.
By the time the lunch bell rings, I’ve already got a new strategy up and running. I’m standing at the door to the dining hall, knowing Cyrus and Elsie aren’t already in there, ready to grab them as soon as they pass. The thing is, though, that’s when the hunger hits me. I skipped breakfast to get into school as early as I did, and all the miles I’ve covered between then and now have used up so many calories, I suddenly feel as if I’m about to pass out. I’d even be willing to share the bog man’s stomach seeds with him, given half a chance, and all I can do is run into the dining hall on a pair of rubber legs and start eating things off my tray before I’ve even found a table. It’s not until Sandy Hammil comes and sits down beside me, and I’m bolting the last few spoonfuls of my raspberry-flavored jelly water, that I start to feel human again.
I grab a few chips off Sandy’s plate and look up to find the room has finally stopped spinning. I take a deep breath and sit back in my seat, exhausted. Then I close my eyes.
“Were you off this morning?” Sandy asks, and I shake my head. “But you weren’t in Baine’s class,” he says.
I wonder if he thinks this is news to me. Maybe he thinks I pay so little attention in school, I was sitting somewhere else entirely, thinking I was in Baine’s class.
“I had some things to take care of,” I tell him, finally opening my eyes. “This Elsie Green thing is killing me.”
“You should have been in class,” Sandy says. “Everything we’re getting now is going to be in the exams.”
I grab a few more chips off his plate and tell him the exams are dead to me.
“My dad’s set up an interview for me first thing in the morning,” I say. “If I can’t make this app work, I’ll be sticking labels on bottles before the exams even start.”
He looks shocked. “I told you that would happen,” he says. “I kept telling you to start paying attention in class.”
But I tell him that paying attention isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “You should’ve heard what Monahan was spouting this morning,” I say. “Paying attention to that kind of stuff could seriously damage your health.”
“What kind of stuff?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t listening. But it had something to do with a dead guy who was all wrinkled up and buried in wet clay.”
“You’re a maniac,” Sandy says. “Anyway, where were you at the weekend? I thought you said you were coming round.”
I have no memory of saying that, but I suppose I must have, so I apologize.
“I had to deal with the Elsie complications,” I say. “I spent all weekend convincing my cousin Harry to take the rap for that fight Chris Yates was in. And ever since then I’ve been trying to find Cyrus McCormack, to square the story with him.”
Sandy forks a piece of beef, considers it for a moment, then decides against it.
“Cyrus’s sitting behind you,” he says, and I spin round in my seat.
“Where?” I ask.
“Over at the windows. Next to John Walker.”
I check it out, and Sandy’s absolutely right. Cyrus is sitting there quite happily, shoveling food into his mouth, and banging away to John Walker about something that seems to be boring John rigid.
“I’ll be back in five minutes,” I tell Sandy, getting up from my chair. But the truth is, I’m not going anywhere. Before I can even get properly to my feet, someone else sits down at our table, in the chair directly opposite mine. There’s no “Hello,” or “Is anyone else sitting here?” or anything like that. Not even a friendly nod. All they say is, “I need to talk to you, Jack. Right now.”
And I lower myself back into my seat again. It’s Elsie Green.
I don’t know if she’d have waited for Sandy to leave even if he’d tried to. I don’t think she even notices he’s there. She just pushes her tray off to the side a bit, stabbing at bits of potato with a strange-looking fork, and then launches straight into her bizarre madness.
“Do you have a sore stomach, Jack?” she asks me. “Just about there?”
And she touches her own stomach quite high up and stares at me without blinking.
“I’m expecting to get one quite soon,” I say. “I just ate the leather beef and the jelly water.”
“Don’t be flippant,” she tells me. “It doesn’t suit you.”
I eyeball Sandy, and he looks kind of afraid and fascinated at the same time. He’s staring at Elsie’s strange hat with the feather in it, and at her weird velvet cape thing.
“Does it feel tight?” she asks me.
I consider my stomach. It just feels normal.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “It feels fine.”
Even by her standards, this is starting to seem like bonkers behavior. She’s never come and spoken to me in her life before, and now this. I brace myself and get ready to ask why she hasn’t friended my profile yet.
“Are you feeling sick?” she says, and Sandy laughs a little bit.
“It’s lunchtime in the dining hall,” he says. “Everyone is feeling sick.”
But Elsie doesn’t even seem to notice he’s spoken.
“I think I know what’s been going on,” she says. “I just want to hear it from your own lips, Jack. Be honest with me—does the project you want me to work on even exist?”
I suddenly feel as if I’ve been punched. “Of course it does,” I say, probably a bit too loudly. “Why? Who told you it doesn’t?”
“Just the wind,” she says. “Just the leaves in the trees. Even what you did to spoil my courtship with Stephen makes sense to me now.”
The leaves in the trees?
I steal a glance at Sandy, and he gives me the crossed eyes and sticks his tongue out the side of his mouth.
“What are you talking about, Elsie?” I ask. “I don’t think I’m following any of this.”
“Yes you are,” she tells me. “I saw you yesterday, Jack. I saw you beneath my window waiting to begin your song. Such devotion.” She turns to Sandy as if they’ve been chatting away all along, and as if she hasn’t been continually blanking him. “He was there for hours,” she says, and Sandy lifts his eyebrows away up into his hair.
“One hour,” I say. “Even less than one hour. And—”
She holds a hand up to stop me, and Sandy looks as if he’s starting to enjoy this. The bastard.
“I got the message you sent me, too,” she says. “The friend request. And a friend told me about your scene with Drew Thornton in the corridor on Friday afternoon. They said you looked quite incensed. So I want to give you the chance of explaining what’s going on.”
“Nothing’s going on,” I tell her. “Well, quite a lot’s going on, really. Everything’s under control, though. I’m just working away on—”
I stop, suddenly realizing Sandy doesn’t know anything about Operation Naked Drew, and that’s exactly how I want to keep it. “I’m just working away on . . . your request,” I say. “It’s become a bit complicated, but it’s going to happen, Elsie. No question.”
“Such selflessness,” she whispers. “Isn’t love a strange taskmaster?” she says to Sandy. “The very thing that will break Jack’s heart, he’s willing to do in the service of my h
appiness.” She turns back to me. “Nothing can ever come of this longing I’ve awakened in you,” she says. “I hope you understand that. You know how deeply devoted I am to Drew.”
“Will you still help me with my programming, though?” I ask her. “If I manage to do the Drew thing for you?”
She looks at me with what I can only imagine she thinks is extreme pity. “If you feel the need to continue that tenuous connection between us, then I’ll do it,” she says. “As long as you fulfill your promise.”
“Thanks, Elsie,” I say, and a massive sense of relief wells up in me. I can’t say I’ve got any idea what she’s been talking about, but I was starting to get scared she might cancel the Objective-C agreement. After everything.
She organizes her tray and gets to her feet, the bizarre cape thing swishing about and covering Sandy’s face for a minute. Then, just as he pushes it out of the way, she leans across the table and gives me this terrifying kiss on the cheek.
“Be brave,” she whispers, and then she turns to Sandy. “Look after him,” she says, and as she floats away the first-year girls who passed me in the corridor last time I was talking to Elsie walk past again.
“I told you she was your girlfriend,” the squeaky-voiced one says, and Sandy starts having the time of his life. He looks as if he’s about to burst. He tries to speak and has to stop three or four times before he finally gets it out.
“You certainly were busy at the weekend,” he says. “Let’s hear your song, then, Jackdaw. Did you write it yourself?”
He starts laughing like a maniac, and I tell him to give it a rest, although I’m not sure he can even hear me over the noise he’s making.
“I wasn’t anywhere near her window,” I say. “I was away across the road. Let me tell you what really happened.”
But while he’s still laughing, and while I’m starting to get pretty angry at him, somebody or something starts tugging at my sleeve and I try to push it away without looking round.
“Jackdaw,” a voice is saying. “Jack.”
“Get a grip on yourself, Sandy,” I say, still pushing away the thing that’s tugging at my arm. Sandy calms down a bit, and I consider how to explain to him what’s been going on without having to go into the exact details of Operation Naked Drew. But the tugging on my sleeve and the chattering in my ear are making it impossible to think, and I finally turn round to see my cousin Harry standing there.
“It’s the end of the lunch break,” he tells me.
“Thanks for the update, Harry,” I snap. “Stop raping me, will you? I’m trying to sort something out here.”
“But it’s the end of the lunch break,” Harry says again. “I’m going to Bailey’s office now.”
And he lets go of my sleeve and starts walking away. Suddenly, I’m sweating. I spin round in my chair to look for Cyrus McCormack, and I can’t see him anymore. The table where he was sitting before is empty now, and I look desperately round the dining hall, but there’s no sign of him anywhere. All I can see is my cousin Harry gradually fading into the crowd, and all I can hear is the sound of Sandy still laughing.
“Harry!” I shout. “Wait! Nothing’s been sorted yet.”
He doesn’t even turn round. I get up from the table and look quickly at Sandy.
“Wait till Harky hears about that kiss,” he says. “And Davie Brown.”
“Don’t tell anybody anything,” I hiss.
“I won’t need to,” Sandy laughs. “The leaves will tell them. And the wind.”
I’ve got two disasters on my hands at once, and I grip on to the table, turning back and forward between Harry, who’s getting closer and closer to the dining hall door, and Sandy, who’s quite hysterical and getting purple in the face.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I tell Sandy. “I’ll clear the whole thing up. Not a word to anybody. I mean it.”
“I’ll await your return with infinite devotion,” he laughs, and I give him a vicious look. Then I start pushing my way through the throng of disgruntled diners and make a beeline for my demented cousin, in an attempt to stop him bringing the whole thing to the ground.
Options: you need to keep them open in an emergency. So while I’m charging toward Harry, I make sure to ask various randoms if they saw which way Cyrus went. While I’m still in the dining hall most of them point toward the dining hall doors, which isn’t too much of a surprise. Once I’m out in the corridor, they either point to the main doors or they point out to the playground. I keep my eye fixed on Harry as he speed-walks along the corridor, and when I reach the main doors I have to make my choice. If I nip out into the playground and find Cyrus, it doesn’t matter what Harry does. As long as I can fill Cyrus in with what’s happening the whole thing will run like clockwork. But if I dive out there and still haven’t managed to lay my hands on Cyrus before Bailey sends for him, everything could quite easily go up in smoke. So I decide the safest option is to head Harry off first, in case Cyrus proves to be as elusive as he’s been all morning, and I double my speed to make sure I reach Harry before he’s at the end of the corridor. Then I grab him by the arm just as he’s about to push the doors open and head into the main area where Bailey’s office is.
“Quit it!” Harry says, trying to shake me off.
“Slow down, then,” I tell him. “I still need to put a few things in place.”
“I don’t care,” he says. “You had your chance. Lunchtime, we said. I kept up my end.”
“But I only need five minutes,” I say, and I get in front of him and stand between him and the double doors. He keeps trying to lunge past me, but I manage to anticipate his moves and block his path. “I couldn’t find Cyrus this morning, Harry. I’ve only just managed to track him down. He’s right out there in the playground. I only need five minutes to have a quick word with him.”
“Go and do it then,” Harry says, and he lunges for the door again. I get to him just in time and push him backwards, and he kind of staggers.
“Stop being a knob,” he says, and I get a bit wound up. Then I realize if this starts to look like a fight, we’ll have a crowd round us before we know what’s happening, and Bailey will come tanking out of his office all fired up. Harry could get suspended without needing to take part in my scheme, and I’ll probably get expelled.
I do what I can to calm it down.
“Listen,” I say, “everything’s under control. Let’s go and find Cyrus. Five minutes—that’s all. Then you’re on a ticket to university. What’s the point in risking it all?”
He goes kind of loose; his arms hang by his sides. “Did you sort everything out with Chris Yates?” he asks. “Is he putting the word round?”
“Of course,” I lie. “That’s all taken care of. All we have to do is let Cyrus get a good look at your face, let him commit it to memory, and then it’s game on.”
He screws his mouth up and then looks over his shoulder, back along the corridor. “Where is he?” he asks.
“Just out there,” I say. “Just out the main doors.”
“Move it, then,” Harry says, and I give him a good hard push and we head back the way we came.
I start thinking Cyrus maybe has the ability to teleport. Or turn invisible whenever he wants. Trying to find him starts out like a rerun of the morning’s fiasco. Everyone’s directions lead to nothing, and Harry is soon getting jumpy and ready to make a dash for Bailey’s office before the bell rings for the end of lunch. Then, just when I’m trying to work out how to head him off again, somebody tells us Cyrus is round the back of the old building, down near the bins, so we follow their directions and there he is, standing with a group of weirdos all pointing their phones together in the middle of a circle. When we get closer, it looks like they’re playing some kind of geeky game, all shouting and frothing at the mouth. Cyrus is wiggling his phone about with the rest of them, and we stand back and watch until Cyrus groans loudly and pulls his phone out of the circle. He holds it up and looks at the screen, pushing some buttons, whil
e the rest of them keep wiggling and foaming, and we take a few steps closer to him.
“Cyrus!” I say, and he looks up, then looks back at his phone again. “We need to talk.” He shakes his head, so I move closer until I’m standing right beside him. I look at his phone and there’s a little cartoon duck on it, moving about. “This is my cousin Harry,” I say.
“So what?” Cyrus shrugs. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“I’m The Jackdaw,” I tell him, and he starts laughing. Some of the phone goons start laughing too.
“More like The Sparrow,” Cyrus says, and the phone junkies crease up. I laugh a little bit too, just to keep him sweet. I can already understand why Chris Yates found it necessary to lay into him. Even though Chris was on a final warning. But I chuckle along with the witticism, and nod as if Cyrus is some kind of superbrain.
“We want to talk to you about that moron Chris Yates,” I say. That wakes him up. Suddenly he’s all ears, and I ask him to step away from his idiot gang so we can talk properly, although I don’t call them his idiot gang to his face.
Harry stands fidgeting with his watch strap while I lay the whole thing out for Cyrus. I tell him all he really needs to do is remember Harry’s face, and give a quick nod when Bailey asks if this is who he was fighting.
“He might not even ask you,” I say. “It’s just a precaution.”
I tell him how it will save the school trip, and I explain all about what it will mean to Harry. How it will sort things out between him and his dad. How it will get him into university.
I give it my all. I make it so’s it couldn’t be simpler, or easier, or less skin off Cyrus’s nose. I lay it all out in less than a couple of minutes. Done and dusted.
And Cyrus isn’t having any of it.
17
I spend most of the night lying awake, staring into the darkness. There’s a point early on, where I start to drift off, when I see a big orange shape and hear the dream voices chattering, but then my door opens and my dad shoves his head into the room.
“You awake, Jack?” he says, and I make a noise to let him know I’m probably not. He takes it to mean I’ve just been lying there waiting for someone to chat to, and he comes in and stands beside my bed.